Burne-Janes as a Decorative Artist

ALAN CRAWFORD
ne day in April r895, Edward Burne-Jones was at
work in his studio, grumbling to his assistant,
Thomas Rooke. "People don't know anything about
our work and don't really care .... There was that
design of Christ ... no one even looked at it when it
was shewn in the New Gallery. They only saw that it wasn't oil-
painted; and yet it said as much as anything I have ever done."
1
The design of Christ was not one ofhis famous paintings, not
Le Chant d'Amour, or The Golden Stairs,or King Cophetua and
the Beggar Maid (cat. nos. 84, ro9, rrz). It was a design for
mosaic decoration in a church. It was a work of decorative art.
And yet he thought it said as much as anything he had ever
done, and the remark reflects the importance that decorative
art had in his own perception of his oeuvre.
Burne-Jones designed many things, including jewelry,
grand pianos, and the costumes and scenery for a stage play.
There is even a delicate watercolor design for a pair of shoes.
But he was preeminently a maker of pictures, and most of his
work as a decorative artist was in media that lent themselves
to picture-making. He drew illustrations for books. He
designed embroideries and tapestries. And he made designs
for stained-glass windows.
2
Photographs ofBurne-Jones's studios show paintings and car-
toons for decorative art jumbled up together (fig. r). He knew
where everything was and moved easily between the two kinds
of work, both in the pattern of his daily life and in the less pre-
dictable workings of his imagination. One kind of work fed the
other. In the late r86os he drew more than a hundred illustrations
for a proposed edition ofWilliam Morris's The Earthly Paradise,
and out of these developed many of his paintings in the r87os
and r88os. This happened easily, for nearly all his paintings
were decorative, and nearly all his decorative art was pictorial.
We are familiar with the phrase "merely decorative."To do jus-
tice to Burne-Jones's work, we should perhaps invent its oppo-
site-something like "profoundly decorative."
GoTHIC REVIVAL
Burne-Jones took up decorative art for two reasons. One was
that he needed to earn his living. This was always an important
consideration, except perhaps around r88o, when his paint-
ings were selling particularly well. The other was that it was
common practice among the progressive artists who shaped
his early career to work across the boundaries of fine and dec-
orative art. On the summer evening in r855 when he and his
friend William Morris decided that they would dedicate their
lives not to the Church, as they had planned, but to art, nei-
ther at that time chose to be a decorative artist. But somehow
that was the start of it all. Morris tried to be an architect, and
then he tried to be a painter, both efforts meeting with little
success; indeed, it was some years before he found his true
metier. Burne-Jones, fragile but single-minded, was from the
outset determined to be a painter. Learning to paint in
London under the guidance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he
found himself among Gothic Revival architects and Pre-
Raphaelite painters who looked back to the medieval period
as a golden age, when art was simply the enrichment of every-
day things. The distinction between fine and decorative art,
which evolved in the Renaissance, seemed to them stale and
academic, and they proceeded to design furniture and deco-
rate ceilings with the same enthusiasm as they painted pic-
tures or carved statues.
Figure r. The garden studio at The Grange, r887- Photograph by
Frederick Hollyer (r837-1933)
5